In early September, a jury trial will begin in North Texas for a 32-year-old activist named Raunaq Alam. He is accused of spray-painting “Fuck Israel” on the wall of a non-denominational church in Euless, a small city roughly 20 minutes from Fort Worth.
But it’s not the graffiti accusation that’s most troubling for Alam and his attorney.
Using a hate-crimes statute, Tarrant county has enhanced its criminal mischief charges against Alam so he now faces between two and 10 years in prison. The county’s argument – and the charges – are the same for two other activists, who will face trial separately at later dates.
For Alam, the official indictment argues the activist has “bias or prejudice against a group identified by national origin and/or ancestry and/or religion, namely, the state of Israel or Jewish faith”.
Attorneys and experts interviewed by the Guardian say this is a legally questionable move that conflates the state of Israel with Judaism and infringes on the right to free speech. After all, the alleged graffiti specifically named “Israel”, not Israelis, and Israel is not a person, nor one of the protected classes that hate-crime laws ostensibly exist to protect. What’s more, the church wall that was allegedly defaced does not belong to a synagogue.
In a motion to quash the hate-crimes enhancement, Alam’s attorney, Adwoa Asante, points out that Texas’s criminal code “provides clear guidelines as to which protected classes can be used in the prosecution of hate crimes”.
“Nowhere in the statute does it cite governmental entities such as states as part of protected persons or group,” Asante wrote. “If citizens and persons within the United States are allowed to say and express ‘Fuck America’, why would the condemnation of a foreign country garner more enhanced prosecution from the state of Texas?”
County prosecutors did not respond to questions from the Guardian. Yasmin Nair, a writer and researcher who has studied and critiqued hate-crimes legislation, says these charges show how these statutes can be used by powerful entities to suppress speech deemed unpopular.
“The notion of a hate crime has been fitted over these very expansive definitions of antisemitism,” Nair said. “Now, hate-crime laws can be used to fulfill a rather different agenda, that’s not even entirely a domestic agenda. Even thinking of critiquing what’s happening in Gaza is considered antisemitic.”
Alam said he has been outspoken about human rights issues since his high-school days in Texas. Most recently, his work has centered on the plight of the Palestinian people who are enduring man-made starvation and a brutal Israeli military assault that has killed tens of thousands of civilians, many of them women and children. Some experts have said Israel is carrying out a genocide.
“We don’t know if he’s guilty of this offense or not,” Asante said. “It’s simply a matter of how far the government is going to silence and to repress anybody that opposes the genocide of Palestinians, so much so that they’re expanding what it means to engage in a hate crime.”
Alam adds that anyone who knows him knows he’s not a hateful person.
“I’ve always spoken out in favor of people that are oppressed,” he said. “It’s something that’s just truly embedded in my core. When I see people that are treated unfairly, I believe it’s my duty to use my voice for those people that don’t have a voice to speak or that don’t have a platform to speak.”
At this point, Alam has been arrested multiple times as the charges against him have changed. He says he lost his job when police, accompanied by the FBI, showed up to arrest him for the first time in March 2024. They also talked to his co-workers.
The goal, his attorney believes, was “reputational damage”.
“And it worked, because he lost his job.”
At first, Alam was facing a misdemeanor for the alleged graffiti, and the county even offered a deal for probation. It was ultimately revoked, and sometime between his original arrest in March 2024 and last fall, the county decided to elevate the graffiti charge to the felony level and use the hate-crime statute to seek a prison term of up to 10 years. The prosecutors now claim the damage caused more than $750, even though the original arrest records claim the damage was under $200.
Mark Streiff, a defense attorney who often works in Tarrant county, said he thought Alam has a good chance of getting a fair trial, “at least from a jury standpoint”.
But Alam’s prosecutor, Lloyd Whelchel, typically tries high-profile cases such as capital murders. To Streiff and the other defense attorneys, assigning Whelchel for this case – and adding the hate-crime charges at the same time – seems political, though not wholly surprising.
Recently, Tarrant county became a precursor for Texas’s broader redistricting efforts. “I like to joke around and call it Tyrant county,” said Streiff, who is concerned free speech is being eroded in Texas.
He recently represented Carolyn Rodriguez, a well-known local police watcher who was found guilty of hindering a meeting by disorderly conduct after shouting an expletive at the judge who played a significant role in the county’s redistricting efforts. Rodriguez and Streiff are appealing against the conviction.
Streiff points out that Texas has a spotty history with hate-crimes legislation.
For instance, the perpetrator behind the 2019 attack of Muhlaysia Booker, a transgender woman living in Dallas, was not charged with a hate crime because gender identity is not protected under the state’s hate-crime statute. The attacker, Edward Thomas, was convicted of misdemeanor assault and sentenced to 300 days in jail. Booker was murdered a year later by a different person.
Alison Grinter Allen, a longtime defense attorney in north Texas, is representing Afsheen Khan, a 23-year old woman whom the county also plans to try for hate-crime charges related to the graffiti allegation. Grinter Allen agrees with Streiff that the charges reek of politics: the Tarrant county prosecutor “wants to shine the boots of a president and a regime that everybody knows is on the wrong side of history”, she said.
At the state level, the Texas legislature almost unanimously passed a bill requiring public school districts, open-enrollment charter schools and colleges and universities to use a controversial definition and working examples of “antisemitism” in student disciplinary hearings.
Those examples include “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, eg by claiming the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor”; “applying double standards by requiring of it (Israel) a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”; and “holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel”.
“It may surprise some of you to learn that Jewish communities do not uniformly support this bill,” state congressman Jon Rosenthal, a Democrat, said. “I would suggest that if we really wanted to address religious discrimination, religious persecution, in bullying, that we would be crafting a law to go after any form of religious persecution.”
Khan, Grinter Allen’s client, says her mental health “has definitely deteriorated” over the prospect of prison time. “Journalists and people that are standing up [to genocide], they are for sure being targeted, especially those who look like me.”
But in many ways, she considers herself fortunate.
“It could be worse,” she said. “I mean, I’m looking at what’s going on in Palestine, how there are political prisoners over there that have been suffering for years and years now.”
Alam also wants as much focus as possible to remain on Gaza and the tens of thousands of people who have been killed there by Israeli soldiers.
“I have so much love and compassion for people, and that’s the main reason why I’m so outspoken,” he said. “That’s why I’m an activist: because I care so much about people, and I care so much about injustice. So the people around me, they support me. And I guess they just want to see me get through this.”
